


Last Love

by YourGayDads



Series: Mating Mates [5]
Category: Black Sails
Genre: M/M, Modern AU, Oral Sex, early relationship maundering, thomas has a shitty tattoo
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-04
Updated: 2020-05-04
Packaged: 2021-03-02 00:54:43
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,161
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23996341
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/YourGayDads/pseuds/YourGayDads
Summary: James wants Thomas to stay the night.
Relationships: Captain Flint | James McGraw/Thomas Hamilton
Series: Mating Mates [5]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1650973
Comments: 6
Kudos: 54





	Last Love

**Author's Note:**

> uh hopefully the chronological back-and-forth isn't confusing.

With each successive visit, James found himself in Thomas’s octopedal hold earlier and earlier in the evening and farther and farther away from his flat. Tonight, his hand was in his back pocket before they’d turned the corner, his mouth suctioned to his pulse before he could fish out his keys. He crowded James into the shallow shelter of the building’s threshold, laughing all the while, a bit tipsy. He spun him around and pressed his back against the door to kiss him — devour him really. Even with his tongue sliding around his, he was still somehow laughing. For a moment, James had to set aside the enormous task of unlocking the front door and give in to him. What a strange feeling it was to give in like that. Without a single care. It was a wonderful feeling that he never thought could be.

Then the brush of Thomas’s erection against his reminded him —

“Inside,” he whispered hoarsely against Thomas’s cheek.

They nearly fell into a pile in the vestibule. The motion-sensitive light overhead spluttered on, plinking fitfully and spitting fluorescence. Thomas reached up and tapped the tube until it stabilized. James dutifully gathered up the mail the only other tenant left scattered on the floor. Waiting, Thomas looked up and around and ran a hand down the acanthus wallpaper that covered the entire hall.

His eagerness to see the place James called home would have given anyone the impression that he lived somewhere far less ordinary than this modest flat above a hardware shop. James persistently talked it down, but he was as eager if for a different reason. That entire day had thrummed with anticipation over the prospect of Thomas spending the night with him for the first time. And then that prospect became reality when Thomas linked his arm with his and presumptuously invited himself over. After they arrived, he peered into the shop window and exclaimed _flanges are on sale!_ a little too loudly. He extolled the color of the front door (“mortlake blue” apparently) and the musty wallpaper whose swirling pattern he was tracing now. So enamored of it, he even had to take a photo to show a friend at the V&A. James had thought it ugly and fussy, but Thomas’s appreciation of it cast it in a new light as every association with him tended to.

The hall light spluttered back off when they reached the first floor. Thomas had already gotten James’s belt open outside and his fly at the top of the stairs. Miraculously James made it inside with his jeans mostly up. Thomas shucked his own jacket and hastily closed the door on it. He would have left it if James didn’t scramble to pick up the undoubtedly expensive article of clothing. Shoes kicked off across the sitting room, Thomas impatiently decreed no more laced boots as James struggled to remove his at a more acceptable speed. 

It amused James to think about the Thomas of only a few weeks ago, the Thomas he was familiar with the months prior. The man who in public fluidly navigated the minefield of people’s egos and subtly exploded them. The man who knew exactly what to reveal about himself and just how much in order to come off as authentic. How calculatedly careful his approach was, how light yet open his touch in feeling James out. But in private, well…

Thomas didn’t have any qualms about tearing his own shirt open but was mindful in unbuttoning James’s. With each freed button, he rewarded himself with a kiss. Halfway down, he began to lower himself and lavished more kisses on every inch of skin exposed until he was on his knees. He gracelessly yanked James’s jeans down, toppling him into a low bookcase. The stolen Wyatt book, which had been sitting on top, tipped over the side.

Thomas had left it there the first time he came over. Or rather James had left it there, unable to reshelve it, its placement proof of Thomas’s presence. Whenever he passed it, he felt it tug at him, at the corners of his mouth, and had to smile. He would see him clearly as he did from the kitchen that night, running his fingertip along the spines of his books, and hear him, punctuating his quiet study of the titles with periodic yelps of excitement. He had waved the book at him with a gleeful smile then set it down to draw James into his arms and lead him to the sofa.

They left it where it fell, and now it was James leading Thomas to the sofa. They sank into it and into each other. Thomas wrapped his legs around his waist and ground against James in slow, measured rotations. James tipped his head down. He moaned into his sternum, overwhelmed. This wasn’t the second or third or even the fifth time. Yet each time he thought, to his amazement, here he was again.

James carefully placed Thomas’s cufflinks on the coffee table then unbuttoned his crisp, white shirt. He ran his hand down his side then up his torso. Thomas guided it to his pec and squeezed his hand over it. James pinched his nipple, which he had learned Thomas particularly enjoyed. He gasped and threw a hand against the wall as he arched into his touch. James could hear the swish of the painting over the sofa as it swayed against the wall.

“You painted this, didn’t you?” Thomas asked, sitting backwards on the sofa to examine it.

“Oh. Yeah.”

“I can tell.”

“How’s that?”

Thomas straddled his lap after James sat down next to him. “For a start, you didn’t sign it.”

The painting stilled by the time they decided to move on to the bedroom. They only made it to the doorway when Thomas embraced James again. He gently tugged his head back by the hair to access the thick column of his neck. Thomas pressed his nose to his skin and breathed him in. Standing on the balls of his feet, James stumbled, off-balance again. He dug his fingers into Thomas’s hips and braced himself for a fall.

The bed was a few tantalizing feet away, and Thomas finally danced them to it. It creaked frighteningly beneath them as James pulled Thomas on top of him. He was pleasantly, crushingly heavy. He could feel his bones give way to his weight which pushed the air out of him in a drawn-out sigh. He was only able to pretend for so long that he didn’t miss this — the broad shoulders, the narrow hips, the expansive hands that held so much of him — and nor was Miranda able to pretend that she didn’t notice. She knew James was rarely inclined to articulate his own desire however much she encouraged him. An artifact he supposed from when he was young and beginning to recognize it as well as become unnerved by it as something out of his control.

Skin and kisses hot, muscles bunching and stretching beneath their searching hands, they twisted and writhed around each other. Moans passed back and forth between their mouths. James raised himself, put enough distance between them to capture his nipple between his lips and swirl his tongue around it, and to collect his leaking cock in his fist.

Thomas threw his head back. His fingers skated over James’s scalp.

“Oh… Oh, James. James, I…”

He didn’t finish the sentence. However he was going to, he didn’t need to. He had already told James that he loved him, far ahead of the schedule James had sketched out in his mind. Not in the throes of passion or post-coital euphoria but on the landing. He was about to descend the stairs when he turned around. James was standing in his doorway, intending only to step back inside after the hall light had blinkered off again. The beams of passing cars streamed through the fanlight and lit up Thomas’s face just enough for James to see how serene it was.

“I love you,” he said simply like the phrase could be interchangeable with “bye” or “I’ll text you.” He smiled and walked down before James could respond.

As if he even had the wits to respond. It’s not that he didn’t believe him. It’s that he did.

“Is it weird?” he asked Miranda. “He said it so easily.”

“Just because he did doesn’t mean he doesn’t mean it. He _means_ it. Thomas may say it easily, may love easily, but he loves like it’s the first and the last time.”

James wished he had the clear-eyed certainty Thomas approached their burgeoning relationship with. He was unquestionably fond of him, cared about him, thought about him every day, but was that love? What should it, in fact, feel like? And didn’t it always feel like love in the beginning? Only then to reveal itself after one argument or the discovery of a particularly irritating habit as mere infatuation or lust driven by loneliness.

Thomas hitched an arm around his waist and maneuvered him down onto his back. James had told him he didn’t need all the fingers on one hand to count the number of men he’d been with. Had perfunctory, almost utilitarian flings with that never led to more. With Thomas, there was now opportunity. _Possibility_. Of what, he was still figuring out and let Thomas take the lead.

Thomas sat up and dragged a hand across James’s chest, pulling and rubbing, rough and needy, then down his stomach towards his cock. Without letting go, he shifted himself down and around. He inserted a hand between the bed and James’s ass. Grasping a cheek, he lowered his head over his cock and took his entire length in one impressive swallow. James raised himself on an elbow to watch at first then seeing Thomas’s own cock bobbing inches from his face, he followed suit.

Thomas ran his tongue over his balls then around each. He alternated between licking and gently sucking at the silky skin while he stroked his cock. He enveloped James again in his hot, plush mouth. His moans vibrated around him. His hips jerked once then began to rock, and he slid steadily in and out of James’s mouth. Eventually they both had to pull off. On the verge of coming, neither could continue with much care or skill and took each other by the hand. James gnawed helplessly on Thomas’s thigh as a finger worked itself over his hole, pushing and teasing.

He reached down and touched Thomas’s head. Thomas immediately stopped and looked up at him curiously. James cupped his jaw then motioned for him to turn around and face him, because he needed to see him, to touch his hair and kiss those wet, swollen lips when he’d come. He gathered them both in his hand. With the other, he plucked and twisted Thomas’s nipple. The sensation connected directly with his cock just as James’s thumb pressed into the underside of the head, and he unleashed a cry James’s neighbor had to have heard.

James murmured softly between low chuckles, “Let’s hear that again.”

He wrapped his arm around Thomas’s shoulders and brought him in closer until their foreheads met. Cheeks moistened by their panting breaths, they gave each other the air they needed to live.

Again, like James wanted, he cried out but a little more loudly, underscored by James’s own broken shout. Thomas groaned weakly, rather sweetly, when James gave him a final stroke and wrung the last of his orgasm from him. Clutching each other, they remained like this, seemingly not knowing how to let go, until they had caught their breaths and could relax into the bed. Made weightless by the exhaustion of gratification, James was floating.

“Marry me,” Thomas blurted, bringing James swiftly back to Earth.

“Jesus, Thomas,” he muttered with an incredulous laugh.

“Live with me then.”

“Oh my god,” James moaned and pushed off the bed.

“I’m serious.”

“I know you are.”

“Please?”

“If I wanted you begging, it won’t be for that.”

“ _Oh_.” Thomas reached out and walked his fingers up the side of James’s thigh. “For what then?”

“You really are…”

James directed him to lie back down and wiped him off with a wad of tissues. As he did, he tried to avoid the openly adoring gaze that was constantly testing his limits for intimacy. He had wondered who it was Thomas saw when he looked at him like that if it wasn’t who others saw in himself.

“Someone with the capacity for so much love,” Thomas had answered.

James assumed that he was just projecting one of his many fantasies onto him. The thought that he was that someone was laughable, but when Thomas said it, maybe his heart did grow a little larger. A part of him certainly wanted to be that person. For Thomas at least.

He balled up the tissues and tossed it into the bin across the room. Thomas sat up next to him, scratching himself, before rising to fetch his shirt which had been left by the door. 

He slipped his arm into a sleeve, and James winced at the memory of Thomas finding him on the sofa in the morning. He was anxious about how differently they might see each other the next day without consideration for anything else since Miranda had always been a sound sleeper. Thomas wore the expression of a scolded puppy and apologized profusely for his restlessness. James reassured him as best he could, but he could have sworn the moment he had closed his eyes Thomas increased instantaneously in size, temperature, and twitchiness beside him. When sleep had finally begun to close in around him, he was woken up by the light from the kitchen. There he found Thomas eating a handful of frozen corn and studying the shopping list on the refrigerator like it was the Rosetta stone.

“But what _kind_ of potatoes, James?” he asked as if he was challenging his opinion on the current state of geopolitical affairs. James laughed, shaking his head. He could have told him right then and there that he loved him too but told him to return to bed instead.

It was impossible to not be aware of how big Thomas was, but James couldn’t have imagined how much space he’d actually take up. How much he’d fill not just his bed but his life in such a short period that he sometimes thought he might simply burst. In the middle of that long, sleepless night, he realized that his name even bore some homophonous resemblance to the words “too much.” 

_Lord Too Much Hamilton_.

The sight of his shirt thrown over his back had become too much for him as well.

“You’re not staying?”

Thomas looked at James, surprised. “But I thought…”

“Stay.”

“I don’t want you to be uncomfortable.”

“Tomorrow’s Saturday. I can lie in.”

“You’re sure?” he said softly. “I can sleep on the sofa.”

“No one’s sleeping on the sofa. You’re too long for it anyway.”

James eased the shirt off his shoulders. They settled back into bed together. Thomas pulled James’s right arm across his chest and languorously swept his fingers along it.

It was late, but neither was ready for sleep. This was usually the point when James started to revert from the man who had another person’s genitals in his mouth to the man who could converse politely over coffee with the owner of said genitals as if they’d never been in his mouth. More and more he found the process delayed by Thomas’s overly affectionate ways. More and more he found himself basking contentedly instead — in silence or while endlessly talking about the things either rarely did talk about.

Like the swallow tattoo on Thomas’s groin just below his right hip.

Utterly incongruous to Thomas’s impeccable appearance, it was a truly unfortunate tattoo. The ink had bled heavily from the amateurish execution, and the location of it James had thought reserved solely for young women who drunkenly decide on holiday to get a little something done. Discovering this sad blotch of a bird beneath his perfectly tailored trousers was an oddly delightful surprise though. And as ugly as it was, James couldn’t resist putting his lips immediately to it.

“I know it’s bad. I was sixteen.”

“I might have guessed.”

“I was also in love so one could say I was probably temporarily insane at the time.”

“Your first.”

“My first. Oh, it was like I hadn’t been alive until him.” Thomas stopped suddenly and eyed James warily. “You’re sure you want to hear this?”

“I prefer knowing as much as I can.”

“All right then. He and I didn't interact much at school, but our mothers were friends. One year they decided that we’d spend the summer at his family’s cottage in Salcombe. Just the four of us.”

“So, a summer seaside romance. Straight out of a novel.”

“Yes, it was. And just as stupid.” Thomas put a hand over his eyes, his memories flashing behind them. “It was only appropriate that I commemorated our love with something equally indelible. But also something cheap and where no one would see it. Once we returned to school though, I quickly came to realize what a mistake it was.”

His mouth sagged, and he became quiet, caught off guard by how acutely fresh an old wound could still feel.

“I suppose when you’re young and your skin hasn’t thickened yet, everything simply hooks in deeper, more easily, and leaves an uglier mark.”

James caressed his side in an attempt to be comforting. He never knew such softness in himself at that age, but he never had the luxury of allowing himself to be soft or of being young really. There were some for whom he bitterly wished lives of struggle, the kind that made people hard. But he’d never wish Thomas to be anyone but who he was.

“I was never exactly in the closet, but he firmly was, and I sympathized. I did. I gave him his space when he started acting cagey. Reluctantly, since all I wanted to do was kiss him and hold his hand. Then, one day while I was reading outside, a group of boys he was with approached me. They started flicking lit matches at me and saying the kinds of things boys say.”

“Didn’t he try to stop them?”

Thomas guffawed. “He joined in.”

“What? That piece of shit.”

“I would have gone over and just shoved the largest of them to the grass, but I was too gutted to. Instead I stormed off like a petulant child to the nearest toilets. I sobbed and sobbed in a stall and scratched and scratched it until it bled. A teacher had to lure me out by threatening to call my father.”

“You ever thought to have it removed?”

“By the time that was feasible, I had long accepted it. It was a love that didn’t last, but it was my first delirious taste of it. Therefore it will always remain a part of me.”

If anyone else had said this, James might have scoffed. It did annoy him though how gracious Thomas was being towards a boy who didn’t deserve an ounce of his love.

“And, well, breaking into his room and taking a piss in his cricket helmet might have helped alleviate the pain.”

An alternately satisfying coda.

James had since heard a few more stories along those lines, all ending in heartbreak. Thomas’s.

His fingertips paused over James’s tattoo.

“I wish I had your prescience and chosen something as tasteful as this. I do hope there is a story behind it.”

“No story. Just trying to fit in with the other new crew mates. One of the older lads had improvised a tattoo gun. Like they do in prisons.”

“How did you decide on this though? A crescent moon. A heavenly body revealing only an elegantly curved sliver of its darkened, concealed whole. It’s so simple yet telling.”

“You’re giving me way too much credit.”

“You give yourself too little credit.”

“Listen. There was a list of five things to choose from: a nautical star, an anchor, a crucifix, a heart, and a moon. That’s all there was to that.”

“Who knows, James. Your whole life up until then could have informed your decision to get this.” Thomas’s fingers moved to James’s cheek. “Looking at it feels like I’m looking into you.”

“I guess that’s the intended effect of most people’s tattoos. But this is hardly a window into my soul. Trust me.”

“If I were to — “

“No.”

“What? What was I going to say? You think you know me so well already?”

“You were going to say get another tattoo. Have you learned nothing?”

“I’m a grown man, I can make all the foolish decisions I want.”

He got up from the bed to root around in the pen cup on James’s desk. When he returned, he tossed a sharpie to him with an expectant look on his face.

He presented his right arm to James. “Go on. I am your canvas.”

James wagged the marker in his face. “As long as you promise to wash it off, and don’t try to recreate it in permanent form.”

“I promise.”

“I’m going to deliberately draw it like shit. To deter you.”

“Lord almi— I promise, I promise. Surely Miranda’s warned you though that little deters me.”

So James shot him his most deterrent glare, the one that cowed the biggest and most overconfident midshipmen into silence, but Thomas kissed it effortlessly off his face.

James rubbed his chin as he looked over Thomas for inspiration. Thomas had shut his eyes and hummed while he waited. When he heard the conclusive click of the cap snapped back into place, he opened them. His arm was now adorned with a small scrawl of a sun, the same one that occupied the corners of countless children’s drawings.

“Oh.”

“Too obvious?”

“No smiley face?”

James gestured at Thomas’s own. “Already got one, haven’t you?”

But then the smile disappeared, and Thomas’s mouth pursed in what appeared to be distress. “James, you — you secretly sentimental — I — how — how can I not get this tattooed now?”

“Are you — Thomas, you promised,” James chided. He flinched at his unintentional rhyme.

Thomas turned the flesh of his arm to view the sun more closely. “If I can’t make this permanent, then you know what this means?”

“What?”

“You can never leave me,” Thomas flatly intoned.

“Are you threatening me? Because that sounded like a threat.”

“Hmmm. More like a challenge. One you might consider taking up?”

Deep in contemplation, James scratched his beard.

“James!”

“Yes, okay. Challenge accepted. I guess. Christ, way to lay on the pressure.”

“It’ll be fun. And lovely. I promise.”

James narrowed his eyes at him.

“All right, we’ll probably argue. A lot. About everything — but we’ll enjoy it and become better people for it. And if we get angry, we’ll never end the day so. I’ll text you photos of all the dogs I meet when I’m out and about. And I’ll learn to bake so I can surprise you on your birthday with a cake, and — _oh_ , well, there goes that surprise. And you know we’re going to have lots of wonderful and maybe sometimes weird sex. And we’ll read to each other of course and, er, assemble furniture together?”

“That sounds…fucking horrible.”

“Yes.” Thomas nodded gravely. “Why, painful even.”

“Excruciating.”

“Agonizing.”

“Torturous.”

Their contest of synonyms dissolved into gentle, easy laughter, which itself dissolved into a gentle, easy silence. James looked at Thomas — at his hair sticking straight up on one side, at his funny rubberband mouth, and the eyebrows that were perpetually raised in wonder — and thought, yes, he could be with this man everyday. That it could in fact be easy to love when you were loved back, and Thomas was doing his damnedest to make it easy for him. That it was a feat to love so easily when love in return was never guaranteed. Braver to when you knew well the hurt of losing it.

James cleared his throat. He pointed in the direction of the bathroom and marched Thomas to it. From his seat on the toilet, he monitored the removal of the drawing then inspected Thomas’s arm. Scrubbed pink and cold, his skin was now free of any traces of ink. As an officer, James usually only nodded his satisfaction but gave Thomas a highly unprofessional kiss of approval instead. 

Before returning to the bedroom, James reached into the medicine cabinet and produced a new toothbrush for Thomas. Despite the obvious practicality of it, the gesture felt momentous. Because it meant a change of clothes next and then a drawer and then a set of keys and then the rest of their lives.

**Author's Note:**

> can you tell i gave up trying to give it a neat, pithy ending? what is whatshisface's tattoo of anyway? does anyone know?
> 
> (i also feel compelled to add that thomas insists on coming to james's place, because it's more convenient for james.)


End file.
